Second Lives

by P. D. Cacek

  “A few. Some in the United States, some in other countries.”

  “And it’s not a disease? Could it be some kind of…” Mendoza frowned, shaking his head until the thought gelled, “…hysterical contagion?”

  Barney was impressed and smiled to let Mendoza know it. The man had obviously done some research before their meeting. Barney had written a paper on hysterical contagion while he was still in medical school.

  “If they had had contact with one another that could have been a reasonable assumption, but—”

  “They didn’t,” Cross said. “Henry was pretty much confined to long-term care.”

  “And Sara was….” Palmer shook his head and slumped back in his chair.

  “Then what is it, Dr. Ellison?” Cross asked. “You said you had an idea.”

  “Well, it’s actually my friend’s theory,” Barney admitted, “but I concur. We don’t know what happens to us at the moment of death, and my friend believes that there are certain people who, at this moment, have the ability to fight it…the darkness or whatever it is that comes. This theory can explain the claims of near-death experiences some people have recounted upon being resuscitated. That’s part of it. My friend also thinks that a small minority of these people are so traumatized by the experience that, upon resuscitation, they return to consciousness as someone else. Some part of them knows they died and they can’t accept that so they create an entire new persona, complete with a past history, as a way to…literally survive what happened to them.”

  Sitting back, Barney studied the men’s faces. There was a mixture of disbelief, skepticism and doubt, but mostly hope.

  “I know how impossible this sounds, but it seems the most plausible explanation.”

  It was Dr. Palmer who asked the question they all must have been thinking.

  “Then it wasn’t anything we did?”

  “No, this was not caused by human or mechanical error.”

  There were muttered sighs of relief, but again it was only from three of the doctors. Stanton hadn’t made a sound. Barney thought he understood. Of the four, he’d been the only one performing surgery when his patient ‘died’. Barney made a mental note to seek the man out after the meeting and talk to him, one on one.

  “But,” Cross began, “how is that possible? I mean, how do you explain the details they have? My patient sounds and acts like a little boy.”

  “As you know better than anyone else,” Barney said – and felt a bit like a bully saying it, but thought the point needed to be driven home – “Alzheimer’s patients often display childlike behavior.”

  Cross cocked his head. He knew exactly what Barney had done and wasn’t happy about it. “Yes, they do,” he said, “in a generalized fashion, but they seldom become a child. So how do you explain why my patient suddenly thinks he’s a little boy named Timothy Patrick O’Neal?”

  Barney raised his hands. “Timothy Patrick O’Neal might have been a childhood friend or a friend of his daughter’s. The point is that, somewhere in his history, your patient knew this little boy and obviously the boy’s history, so when he was faced with either accepting his own death or abandoning what he was and becoming someone else, he became Timmy, a little boy with a full life ahead of him.” Lowering his hand, he looked from one man to the next. “Your patients are remarkable. Instead of returning to a life that ended, they created new ones and have so immersed themselves in these new personas that who they were no longer exists. Until, and if, they recover from their fugue states, your patients, for all intents and purposes, did die on August 24th.”

  “Why then?” Stanton said, as he finally looked up and met Barney’s eyes. “What’s so special about that date?”

  “I don’t know,” Barney said.

  “But it’s….” Mendoza shook his head. “My patient speaks Yiddish and thinks he’s a Jew who was shot in the twenties. Jamie’s family isn’t Jewish and his partner says that, except for a few friends, they don’t know a lot of Jews.”

  “It’s very possible it might be the same with your patient as with Dr. Cross’s. Maybe he had a Jewish childhood classmate or friend whose…grandfather got shot in the 1920s and spoke Yiddish. The brain is the world’s greatest depository and if the scenario I proposed happened it’s very likely that information was stored in Jamie’s brain.” Barney shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you except to say that his Yiddish is flawless and he does have the mannerisms of a much older man…which—”

  “What about Sara? She calls herself Elisabeth and keeps asking about a friend named Frances who was a suffragette,” Palmer said. “Suffragette?”

  “History,” Barney said. “She may have read a history about a woman named Elisabeth who was a suffragette and had a friend named Frances, and her reawakening mind latched onto that. What about you, Stanton, any questions about why your patient thinks she’s a teenager?”

  Stanton shook his head and looked back toward the table. “No.”

  It was the way he said it, the tone of that one word, that set off silent alarm bells behind Barney’s eyes. There’s something else. We definitely have to talk.

  Barney let himself smile. “Good. So, there you are. My conclusion is that we are dealing with a rather unique and atypical fugue state that has randomly affected four critical patients in this hospital. As for my recommendation, which I will convey to the families later today, I feel it imperative that the patients be allowed to continue in their new identities until such time as they recover from the fugue state and their memories return.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Cross said and was the first to stand. Mendoza and Palmer followed. Stanton stayed seated. “If that’s all, Dr. Ellison….”

  Barney nodded and the three men left the room quickly and quietly – until they reached the corridor and shut the door.

  “You believe all that?”

  “I don’t know, maybe, but at least we didn’t do anything to cause it.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “How could anyone remember Yiddish?”

  If Barney had been alone he would have chuckled as their voices faded, but he wasn’t alone and he doubted the man sitting to his left would have found anything funny.

  “So,” Barney said and waited.

  It was only two heartbeats before Stanton looked up.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Dr. Ellison?”

  Simultaneous answers, one glib, one straight out of his abnormal psychiatry textbook, came to mind. He used neither. “Why do you ask?”

  Stanton leaned back and pulled a small silver-and-black flash drive from the pocket of his lab coat and tossed it on top of the manila file folders in front of Barney.

  “And this is?” Barney asked as Stanton straightened in his chair.

  “Proof that ghosts do exist, Dr. Ellison. I did a little research, too, when Crissy…after Helen…. Thank God for the internet, huh? Your friend’s assumption that the patients knew the people they’re…that they claim to be is reasonable, and I’m sure their families will accept it wholeheartedly, but that’s not what happened.”

  “Oh?” There were other things Barney could have and wanted to ask, but he kept quiet and just listened.

  “No.” Stanton closed his eyes and began to recite. “Elisabeth Regina Wyman was killed in a suffragette riot in 1914, New York City. Timothy Patrick O’Neal died as a result of a hit-and-run accident a few days shy of his sixth birthday in 1956, Norman, Oklahoma. Aryeh David Rosenberg was murdered in his shop in 1926, New York City, Lower East Side.” He opened his eyes. “Christine Taylor Moore, sixteen, died of a broken neck when she became entangled in a light cord after accidentally falling from the balcony in her high school auditorium, 1992, Hollywood, California.”

  “I applaud your research, Dr. Stanton,” Barney said, “but this just seems to corroborate what I said abou
t them knowing—”

  “Crissy Moore went to my high school. I knew her, she used to call me Blankie Frankie…not to my face, she wouldn’t have done that, but you know how popular girls are when…. I was there the day she died. I went to her funeral – hell, the whole school went to her funeral – and I’ve kept in touch with her family since then.” He took a deep breath. “I know how this is going to sound, Dr. Ellison, and you may want to see me professionally after this, but I think that when Helen died, Crissy’s soul…or spirit or ghost or whatever you want to call it, entered her body. This isn’t a fugue state, it’s something else. I don’t know how or why but I think she and the others came back.”

  Barney picked up the flash drive and ran his thumb over the surface. “And this holds the information you found?”

  Stanton nodded and tried to laugh, and failed miserably. “I know how this must sound.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” Barney said. “Wandering souls isn’t a new idea, Dr. Stanton, and neither is reincarnation. There is a term, Gilgul Hanefesh, which means the transmigration of souls. According to my grandfather, who was a Kabbalistic scholar, and studied the theory of the Zohar, all souls are subject to transmigration if that soul fails to acquire the experience for which it descended from heaven. If that happens, the soul is required to inhabit another body until its mission on Earth is completed.”

  Stanton studied his face. “You believe me?”

  “It’s as viable an explanation as the one my friend offered and lends credence to something else he told me.” Barney slipped the flash drive into the inside breast pocket of his coat jacket. “One of the first cases reported was from the former Soviet Union. The patient, a teenage girl, was killed when the car she was riding in hit a patch of ice and rolled. She sustained numerous injuries, including a broken neck. She died on the operating table only to wake up claiming, very loudly and in a masculine tone, that she was a political prisoner in the Janowska concentration camp.”

  Stanton took a deep breath. “Jesus.”

  “Unfortunately, her injuries were too severe and she died…again, permanently, a few minutes later. That’s all the information my friend had and he only obtained that because he knew the physician who worked on the girl.”

  When Barney finished they sat for a moment and listened to the soft hiss of cool air whispering through the ceiling vents.

  “What are you going to tell their families?” Stanton asked.

  “I’m not sure yet.” He could feel the small weight of the flash drive get heavier with each passing moment. “You knew her? Crissy?”

  Stanton nodded and a very small smile touched his lips. “Not well, girls like her didn’t hang out with guys like me, but yeah, I knew her.”

  “A crush?”

  He nodded again.

  “And you’re sure it’s her?”

  “Yes.”

  Barney took a deep breath. It was impossible. Under all natural law it was impossible, things like that just didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Shouldn’t happen.

  But what if they did?

  “What are we going to tell them, Crissy and the others?”

  Barney shook his head. “I don’t know. I need to talk more with them and…. ” Come on, Ellison, you’re evading the question. Answer the nice doctor. “The truth, I guess.”

  Stanton stood up and walked to the door. “I can’t imagine it…dying and coming back after so many years. Can you?”

  “Can I?” Barney asked himself after Stanton left.

  He’d studied the workings of the human mind for all of his adult life and knew the truth behind mental abnormalities that had once been considered works of the devil. He’d helped numerous patients separate fact from fantasy, reality from psychosis, but could he imagine dying and coming back…and coming back to a different time in a body that was not your own?

  Could he put aside all he knew and not only imagine but accept it?

  Even with the facts, if facts they were, staring him in the face.

  His grandfather would have believed it without question. He’d been a man who’d lived through the real horror of pogroms and the Treblinka concentration camp, yet still could find delight in telling his only grandson stories of dybbuks and spiritual possessions and ghosts that came back. The old man would not only have believed such a thing was possible but accepted it.

  “Why not?” he would have said. “Why could this not happen?”

  And he would have answered, “Because it’s not possible, zaideh.”

  Was it?

  The question (Was it possible?) kept catching him off-guard during the rest of his day and accompanied him home that night. Sitting quietly at his side, the question watched while he studied the files on the flash drive Stanton had given him and listened in when Barney again called his friend at the WHO.

  The question sang him to sleep that night and was there in the morning when he phoned the hospital, requesting another meeting with the hospital’s board of directors to ‘discuss new findings in regards to the four fugue-state patients.’

  The meeting was scheduled for nine and lasted longer than the board may have thought necessary. Other meetings and appointments were either cancelled or postponed while Barney tried to convince them that he really hadn’t lost his mind or didn’t need to go on an extended vacation.

  When the meeting ended and he’d convinced the board, more or less, to agree to his plan of action, the four doctors were called in (Barney had been careful not to mention Stanton’s name when discussing the patients’ histories) and Barney explained it again.

  Then, on the last Friday of August, Barney stood at the podium of one of the hospital’s teaching classrooms and looked out at the bowed heads of the seven people – Mrs. Rollins, Sara Cortland’s husband, parents and in-laws, and Jamie Cooper’s partner – seated in chairs before him. They were the families of the ‘Fab Four’, and they were reading the histories of the people who currently inhabited their loved ones’ bodies.

  The head of the hospital’s legal department sat at the small table to the left of the podium and jumped visibly when Jamie Cooper’s partner slapped the file shut against his knees.

  “Are you fucking nuts?”

  “Language!” Mrs. Rollins, widow of Henry, scolded. Looking up from the file in her hands, she glared at him through the thick lenses of her reading glasses. “You seem like a nice young man and I know you’re hurting, just like the rest of us, but you don’t need to be crude.”

  The man seemed about to say something else, then nodded and looked away. “Sorry.”

  “But it is nuts,” Sara Cortland’s husband, Danny, said, taking up the cause. “It’s….”

  “I think,” Barney said, “the word you’re looking for is unbelievable.”

  “No.” It was Sara’s mother this time. “It’s impossible. Things like this don’t happen.”

  Barney had decided not to tell them about the other cases that had occurred worldwide. “No,” he said instead, “they don’t, but that is precisely what seems to have happened and there’s not a lot that can be done about it except to accept these…guests and try to make the best of a very unique situation.”

  “Make the best…?” Sara’s husband crushed the file he was holding. “My wife died and you want me to accept the thing that killed her?”

  A low muttering began and Barney saw the head of legal inch his chair back…possibly for a quick getaway. Barney held up his hand for quiet.

  “Please. Your loved ones weren’t killed and this isn’t some kind of alien invasion. They…Henry, Sara, Jamie and Helen – ” Barney heard Mrs. Rollins catch her breath. The rest were silent, “ – died as a result of their previous medical conditions. These…. The individuals who currently inhabit their bodies had nothing to do with their deaths. I don’t have an explanation as to why it happened or how, but at the moment o
f your loved one’s passing, their bodies were….”

  “Stolen?” James’s partner suggested.

  Another round of mutters, much angrier now. The head of legal began gathering up his things.

  “No!” Barney’s shout echoed in the near-empty room. “The unoccupied bodies became receptacles and however unbelievable it may be, it happened. Whatever else you might think, I personally feel this borders on the miraculous.” He swiped the air in front of him, ending any new surge of comments that might have been coming. “Think about it for a moment…four wandering souls have come back from wherever it is we go at the moment of death. This is an event that cannot be ascribed to human power or the laws of nature – and that is the definition of a miracle.”

  While the families sat in stunned silence and, Barney hoped, thought about it, he glanced over at the hospital’s legal mind and got a furtive thumbs-up. Then Sara’s mother began to cry, very softly, and Mrs. Rollins closed her file and, pulling a clean white hankie from her purse, sent it down the row, via Jamie’s partner and Sara’s husband, to the woman.

  “Are you sure?” Jamie’s father wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Barney said.

  “But how do you know this…that they are…? How do you know?”

  Barney knew the head of legal wasn’t going to like what he was going to say next – it did sound a bit too much like an admission of something – but that didn’t stop him.

  “I don’t, and that’s the simple truth.” Silence from the families, a soft groan from the legal eagle. “At first, I believed these were all cases of a fugue state…a form of amnesia where the person not only forgets who he or she is, but all characteristics of their personality. I’m sorry, but after some research and speaking further with the patients, I have no recourse other than to accept the facts as they present themselves. These people are exactly who they say they are.”

  “But what if it’s a different kind of fugue state?” Jamie’s partner, Ryan, held up his file like a stop sign. “Just listen to me for a minute. If it is, then he…they…might all get better. Sometimes amnesia patients remember who they are.”